by ·Comments Off on The Warriors (1979, Walter Hill)

A 1979 movie set in “the future”, which looks like… 1980. Cyrus is holding a conclave, wants to unite all street gangs to overthrow the cops and run the city, but so many gangs show up to the meeting and a Vincent Gallo-looking guy shoots Cy from the crowd then fingers the only witness as the shooter. After all this commotion the Warriors have to get back to their home borough with every creep gunning for them, but they don’t even figure out until the movie’s last 20 minutes why everyone’s mad at them. The action choreography is not great, nor sometimes are the goofy costumes (the overalls-and-rollerskates “punks” being the worst). But the comic-book Escape from New York adventure is compelling, and it was already giving West Side Story vibes with its gang stylings when I realized that the shooter is Jerry Horne, whose Twin Peaks costar Dr. Amp was in West Side.

Exactly the pose you make when you’re about to get shot:

Jerry Horne, cartoon version:

Warriors:

by ·Comments Off on L’important c’est d’aimer (1975, Andrzej Zulawski)

I’m going with the original title, since the English That Most Important Thing: Love has always annoyed me. Made between The Devil and Possession, the camera rushes and roams, the Delerue music rises and fades.

Seedy burnout photographer Fabio Testi (a Monte Hellman regular) interjects himself into the lives of fallen actress Romy Schneider (Inferno, The Trial) and her husband Jacques Dutronc (the Godard of Every Man For Himself). They’ve all got some intense half-unspoken feelings for each other, and strict rules around their encounters. Despite his own money problems, Fabio bankrolls a Shakespeare play with Klaus Kinski to get his new actress friend some self-respect. Feels very based-on-a-novel, and it is, but Zulawski and DP Aronovich (Providence, Time Regained) keep it interesting enough.

Fabio’s book collector friend:

by ·Comments Off on Night Moves (1975, Arthur Penn)

Watched this in mid-Feb, not intending it as a Gene Hackman memorial screening, but here we are. Great detective plot, Gene a two-bit private eye who finds the missing girl a half hour into the movie then sticks around as new smuggling/murder plots continue to unfold, until the girl (Melanie Griffith a decade pre-Body Double) is dead, movie stunt coordinator Ed Binns (Sixth Angry Man) is dead after two crashes and trying to murder Gene, giggling stuntman Marv dead underwater, mechanic James Woods floating in the dolphin pool, stepdad John Crawford (DEI-enforcing mayor of The Enforcer) guilty possibly dead, and tough Florida girl Jennifer Warren, whom Gene and I were both really getting to like, head smashed by a plane. Side plot of Gene discovering his own wife’s affair (via an Eric Rohmer movie date) then trying to repair his marriage, which doesn’t go too well, as he keeps returning to this case. Matt Singer gets it, and Filipe points out that “everything plot related happens offscreen.”

by ·Comments Off on Death Race 2000 (1975, Paul Bartel)

Before Schwarzenegger starred in The Running Man, before Stephen King even wrote it, Schwarz’s rival Stallone starred in a better movie about a deadly future game show (based on an Ib Melchior novel). In a totalitarian USA (I cannot relate) David Carradine is a clone puppet masked hero representing the establishment, targeted by the resistance but secretly also planning to destroy the president, as belatedly revealed to his navigator/spy Simone Griffeth. Stallone is his toughest competitor Machine Gun Joe – other quickly-dispatched competitors are Mary Woronov, nazi Roberta Collins (between Caged Heat and Eaten Alive) and Martin Kove (professional Karate Kid antagonist). Most get blown up, the nazi takes a Wile E Coyote detour off a cliff.

A familiar pose:

Frankenstein kills the president and so becomes president – is that really how it works? I’m not very smart now but I was even worse in 2012, so I won’t link to my review of the remake, which is probably fine though I’m not running out to rewatch/reassess it, and we’ll see if the rumored Running Man remake comes out. Am I hallucinating, or did Eric have an Amiga game based on this movie?

Bartel is protective of his creation:

by ·Comments Off on Days of Heaven (1978, Terrence Malick)

Richard Gere is kinda not the good guy in this – he keeps killing his bosses. His “sister” was in Invasion of the Body Snatchers the same year, making her the cinema queen of 1978. I recently saw farm owner Sam Shepard leading The Right Stuff and haunting Hamlet, but he’s one of those guys I can’t seem to recognize. Linda Manz is given incredible lines and makes a great narrator; I need to catch up with her in Out of the Blue. Happy to finally get around to watching this beautiful blu-ray, hope I get to see it in an actual theater someday. Good reactions: Brendanowicz, and PD187 (katy said the same thing). Guess I’ve written up all the Malick movies… Badlands doesn’t have an entry, but was covered here (and is due a rewatch, as are ALL of them, including this one).

Animals of Heaven:

by ·Comments Off on Demon Pond (1979, Masahiro Shinoda)

Thirsty traveler (star of Tampopo) enters dusty village, finds a stream and nearby house, meets Yuri (a female impersonator, also of Yumeji) and coincidentally his long-missing friend Akira (of Samurai Rebellion), who has become Yuri’s reclusive boyfriend and the town bell-ringer who keeps away evil spirits. The traveler would like to see the local Demon Pond before returning to work in the morning and his friend offers to guide him. Seems like a restrained, traditional Japanese folk story so far, but I was underestimating it.

As soon as the girl is alone, a carp poacher spies on her until he’s bitten by a crab, then the movie turns suddenly goofy, the carp and crab transforming into costumed characters off to see the undersea princess (same actre(ss) as Yuri), the eerie score mutated into crazy electro music. The princess wants to see her lover at another lake but is trapped here as long as the bell is faithfully rung. Back in town the poacher gets an angry mob after Yuri, insisting the bell not be rung, realizing their mistake too late as the lake destroys the town. I enjoyed this more than Shinoda’s Silence. Carp also starred in Pitfall, and Crab was in The Eel (heh).

by ·Comments Off on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)

Two siblings and three of their buddies take a lil roadtrip to see if their slaughterhouse grandpa got dug up in the reported wave of grave robbings. This is something I’d completely forgotten: they’re not lost tourists, the Leatherface family is their own family’s next door neighbors. Of course they’re still new-age hippies who’ve lost touch with their roots, but they’re not such sheltered city folks that they won’t stop and pick up a freaked-out and bloody hitchhiker.

Leatherface sits down and takes a breather:

Kirk (sledgehammered) later did set decoration for The Craigslist Killer, Pam (slaughter-hooked) became a catalog foot model, and Jerry (also sledged) left the movie business. Wheelchair-bound Franklin, who sits nice and still while being surprise-chainsawed, was in the next year’s Race With the Devil. With a half-hour left, his sister Sally is the last one alive, getting subdued by a gas station guy with a broom and brought home for dinner before her famous escape. Sally was in Tobe’s Eaten Alive, the hitchhiker became a voice actor for Power Rangers, only the gas station guy returned for the sequel, but all of them – especially Leatherface Gunnar – were haunted for decades by the fangoria fanbase.

by ·Comments Off on Young Frankenstein (1974, Mel Brooks)

Wouldn’t you know it, two people associated with different hilarious mid-seventies Frankenstein films died on consecutive days, so we’ve got a double-feature on our hands. It’s Gene and Marty’s movie, but Teri Garr runs away with it. Leachman isn’t around too much, and Madeline Kahn features (hilariously) only in the first few minutes and the last twenty-or-so, becoming happily Franken-brided, which frees Dr. Gene to be with Teri. I was distracted when Gene arrives at the train station and a kid points him to track 29. Is the joke that there’d be so many tracks in Transylvania? Was Dennis Potter watching this on cable while writing the script for the Nic Roeg movie?

by ·Comments Off on Flesh for Frankenstein (1973, Paul Morrissey)

Paul Morrissey died at the tail end of SHOCKtober so I immediately put on his masterpiece. Mad Scientist Udo Kier is building a race of zombie superpersons with his equally mad assistant Otto, while the doctor’s wife is having a barely-secret affair with houseboy Joe Dallesandro, who is disturbed to see his late buddy’s head atop Udo’s monster.

Beautiful movie, full of Cronenbergian wound-fetishes and guts comin’ at ya (it’d be so sweet to see the 3D version). I can’t remember the Frank family’s two children having any lines but they’re lurking behind walls and windows in every scene. All the people and monsters tear each other apart through malice and/or incompetence, and after Udo’s incredible disembowelment, Joe is still alive but a captive of the psychotic tots (she’s the girl we saw die in Who Saw Her Die, soon to star in Demons).